In the third book of The Dunciad, Alexander Pope has his Goddess of Dulness transport the King to her temple where she curtains him with “Vapours blue” and prepares him to listen to Oracles and talk with Gods:

Hence the Fool's Paradise, the Statesman's Scheme,
The air-built Castle, and the golden Dream,
The Maid's romantic wish, the Chemist's flame,
And Poet's vision of eternal Fame.

Pope's wit here is about as gentle, about as subtle, as it gets. He likes these people, not despite their folly, but perhaps because of it. They are a people who prefer surface to interior. But, perhaps because of their earnestness, he offers a wry view, saving his more caustic wit for others. He makes an almost parallel image in his Essay of Man:

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king;
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his Muse.

For all its parallels, this quatrain is interesting for its contrasts. Its people are doers, not dreamers, they are people who have gone beyond the mere surface, beyond the superficial, into lunacy, dance, starvation, into the most meaningful visionary expressions of being. A late twentieth-century reading of Pope's lines invites a comparison with the naked jig of Dr. Williams, alone in his room, his dance and his poem and his breath and heart all pounding out the same tune.

The poem begins and ends in the body. The poet is a midwife, the critic is a coroner. Seen from the outside, the poet is a daydreamer with visions of superlatives dancing gracefully through his or her otherwise empty noggin. Examined from the inside, the fully fleshed dynamics of living language incorporating heartbeat and breath becomes the measure of the poem: the poem, in order to exist, must make human noises. If the poet is a midwife, the body of the poet becomes pregnant with meaning; the voice itself becomes the body of the poem as it is delivered. …

The poems gathered in Rose are autobiographical, thoughtful, and wonderfully engaging. His father is a dominating figure, and Lee struggles with his memory of that strict, almost forbidding figure of a minister. In a beautiful poem, “Eating Alone,” the poet has pulled the last of his onions from his garden, washed them, and remembers his father and a particular silence:

It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.
White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

James Wright struggled for years before he learned to get his poems this direct, this plain, and this true. It's not merely the poignancy of Lee's poem, but what lies behind it: to be young in America is to fear loneliness above all else. Lee not only embraces his loneliness, he welcomes it, and, with it, that hard-earned wisdom most poets gain, if at all, only in middle or late career.

Born in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1957, Lee fled with his family to escape Sukarno's prisons, living in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan before coming to the U.S. To his credit, his worldliness is far more intimately felt than advertised in his poems, although they do celebrate his ethnicity, often using anecdotes to illustrate family relationships. His maturity as a poet is simply astonishing. In “Mnemonic,” he offers a kind of ars poetica

I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me.
I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater.
He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back.
It is the sweater he wore to America,
this one, which I've grown into, whose sleeves are too long,
whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner.
Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight,
it is black in the folds.
A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I'm forgetful,
but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.
For instance:
God was lonely. So he made me.
My father loved me. So he spanked me.
It hurt him to do so. He did it daily.
The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return.
The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually.
I won't last. Memory is sweet.
Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.
Once, I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

If [Mary Jo] Salter's is the voice of the status quo [in Unfinished Painting], if she is the embodiment of complacency, Lee goes quietly, methodically, about the business of stripping away layers of the psyche, digging into the deepest interior to reveal his soul. In his familial poems, Lee risks sounding like all the many thousands of MFA poets remembering their own vanished youth; but he doesn't. His humility is rare and refreshing. His voice and his people are particular, each unique, and he has none of the complacency—which is, after all, a form of cowardice—of so many of his contemporaries. His poems are made from his life with his life, his poems are earned. He dares to be simple. And he is surely among the finest young poets alive. Lee's second book, The City in Which I Love You, is the most recent Lamont Selection, and as such redeems the Academy of American Poets. If his more recent poems retain a kind of raggedness, it is a lack of polish well-suited to rough-hewn craft. Perhaps his recent popular success has distracted him, but The City in Which I Love You also seems more wordy, more casual than the poems of Rose. City is, nonetheless, a powerful and engaging book.

Assuming that the best way to make a poem is to place perfect words in perfect order, the next question is, “Shall we place more importance on getting at some greater truth or upon making a beautiful object?” This is the basic argument between open and closed forms. The predetermined form sometimes, perhaps even often, forces the poet to see things from a fresh perspective; but it also presents times when certain kinds of truths become modified in order to accommodate a syllabic count or a rhyme. The closed form works wonderfully within a narrative frame, or in traditional song. The open form, revealed only as the poem reveals itself, cannot be separated from the poem, and admits a grander variety and places greater emphasis upon a poet's vision. Open forms also tend to conceal the weaknesses of those who remain relatively unskilled either in versification or in the use of poetic energy. What makes “regular meter” interesting is the way our language bucks against regularity; nothing would be duller than a perfect iambic. Our best poets draw strengths from both traditions.